Talk:Philippines/Mapping conventions

re: road classifications

Moved the discussion here: From MikeCollinson

• motorway - Northern Luzon Expressway, South Super Highway (as far as EDSA with limited turn-offs).
• trunk - National Roads (for example the McArthur Highway and The National Highway down Laguna de Bay)
• trunk - Other very major urban arterial roads, e.g. EDSA, Roxas Boulevard, C-5
• primary - Other main roads in cities (e.g. Pasay Road, Buendia) and between towns.
• secondary - Routes to get across a local area, for example the road you need to take to get into a Barangay
• tertiary - A central street within, or crossing through the barangay, with substantial traffic
• residential - All other streets with mostly houses, particularly inside barangays.
• service - Access roads for places such as car parks
• unclassified - everything else

It is not always easy, for example would you classify Espana / Quezon Avenue as primary or trunk?

Here's a link to the map features page describing each class of highway. They are UK roads, but the pictures should give some ideas as to what each class of roads look like. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_features

From maning: Officially, Philippine roads are classified by administrative jurisdiction as: National Roads, Provincial Roads, Municipal Roads, Barangay Roads.

By its function that's also a different case, for instance in the rural areas, some roads maybe classified in the above classes but maybe used for other purposes.

By its physical condition, that's also another thing. Again in the rural areas, some roads maybe classified physically as tracks (dirt roads, unpaved gravel roads), but functions as a major link from different towns and municipalities.

from IanHaylock: Primary road is one that is suitable for HGV's. Yes I know a HGV driver in this country considers any road suitable :-) But going on this it would mean that dual carriage ways should all be primary, and only the largest i.e. four lane roads could be considered primary roads. Classifying a road as primary because it's the primary route between two places is not correct. Having a road marked as a "national highway" does not help either, as a road near me ("Molino Road") starts at Alabang as a two lane road, which is unsuitable for HGV's. Though later on the road does become wider and suitable for HGV's. I have only used unclassified once for a road in Laguna which consisted of a concrete strip just one lane wide.

I've not seen this definition before. Though I did read recently that the original intent, now scrapped, behind marking some primary roads in the UK as "trunk" was to define a arterial system for HGVs. MikeCollinson 09:08, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

I have been labelling all dual carriageways, as primary roads. Roads that I use to travel from place to place that aren't dual carriageways, I have been labelling as secondary roads. I noticed some trunk roads in Manila whan I was convertng them to 2 seperate ways, as they were dual carriage ways, and so left them as trunk roads.

from sorabsuperstar So how do we define "tertiary" then? In the Barangay i want to focus on for now, which is Legaspi in Makati (i know the area very well), all so far existing roads were tagged "tertiary". (to be precise, IanHaylock tagged them so) Albeit the fact that there are huge highrisers there, i would say many of these roads still are "residential" roads, meaning "other streets inside brgy". (@Ian: therefore i may continue retagging them to "residential" in course of updating traffic rules to these streets?) For me "tertiary" should be defined as a road that is not really connecting barangays, but is a central street within or cross-through the barangay, with substantial traffic . In (my) Brgy. Legaspi, Legaspi Street and Dela Rosa would be an examples for this.

I think you are right. Until recently, I've not used tertiary for tagging at all in any of the countries I map in. But then I found that some of roads I was marking as unclassified or residential are a sort of main road for a local area and needed emphasis on a rendered map - so I use tertiary. MikeCollinson 09:08, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

re: Change of road types

Pedestrians can cross on certain stretches, provided that it is a dual carriageway kind of road, and/or tagged as highway=crossing. Also, footbridges and tunnels used for pedestrian purposes are to be connected by the roads/streets into this setup or a similar one. I've previously changed the classification of the MacArthur Highway (from somewhere in Pampanga to Maysan Road in Valenzuela City) from primary to trunk (per this question here) due to the fact that the said road is probably the only alternative to NLEX, and it is one of the major arteries coming to and fro Metro Manila (its southern terminus), Bulacan, Pampanga, and the rest of Northern Luzon. -Ianlopez1115 12:30, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Tricycle terminal

I propose we add this

  amenity=tricycle_station

Good Practices section, numeric village names

Thanks Rally for adding the Good Practices section. It's a great addition to this wiki, and clearly documents your mapping experience.

However, I noticed a disconnect from the earlier conventions and I'm wondering if there's any consensus about pushing one practice over another. It suggests that we "Remove prefix Barangay if name is Numeric, for small city-barangays where land-area, clustered per Zone or per District". The previous convention (which I support) is to tag these village nodes as "Barangay 999", including the barangay prefix. The suggestion to drop the prefix is too close to the frowned upon practice of "mapping for the renderer".

Can we have a consensus about this? Perhaps we can continue follow the old convention, but add a short_name tag to address the issue raised by Rally. For example:

  place=village
  name=Barangay 999
  short_name=999

Water stations (bottled water, purified water, etc)

Propose to tag (and update) these POIs as follows:

   amenity=drinking_water
   fee=yes
   access=customer
   name=*

access=customer implies paid service, while fee=yes explicitly tags it as so.

The current recommendation is one of the following:

   shop=purified_water
   shop=water_refilling

According to taginfo, both options has been used only 42 times.

what do you think?

Tags for educational institutions

I placed a proposal for the tags for educational institutions:

Type	Picture	Tags	Description/Notes	Common terms or Tagalog (Filipino) translation
Day care center		amenity=kindergarten	They are normally maintained and operated by the local government (city/municipality or barangay) and provide education to children before school age.	day care
Elementary school		amenity=school	They are mainly maintained and operated by local divisions of the Department of Education (DepEd). They provide education on children between 5 to 12 years of age.	paaralang elementarya
High school		amenity=school	Mostly maintained by local divisions of the Department of Education. They provide education from Grade 7 (formerly 1st Year) to Grade 10 (formerly 4th Year).	HS, hayskul, mataas na paaralan.
College		amenity=college	They are primarily privately owned and operated, and provide higher education.	kolehiyo
University		amenity=university		pamantasan, unibersidad
Private schools		amenity=school	They are privately-operated schools where a student's admission is made through payment of a tuition fee. They may range from small school buildings to complexes composed of multiple buildings and sometimes have open areas.
Catholic/parochial schools		amenity=school religion=christian denomination=roman_catholic	They are schools owned by a local Roman Catholic parish or a Roman Catholic diocese or archdiocese. Also, they practice Catholic religious education and teaches Catholic doctrines. Admission usually requires being a Catholic in addition to tuition fees
Vocational/technical schools		amenity=school	They provide technical or vocational courses for students who finished high school.
Driving school		amenity=driving_school	They teach basic driving skills and rules to drivers or people who want to drive a motor vehicle.

This would be the standard tags for educational institutions in the Philippines.--TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 11:23, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

new namespace : admin_type:PH=*

Are there any special reason to add this namespace tag that's not adequately covered by already existing key like designation? GOwin (talk) 05:14, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Revised road classification system

@Ianlopez1115:, @GOwin:, @Schadow1:, and @Ralleon:

I have placed this proposal for the new road classification system, which will now include official classification (expressway, national road, provincial road, city/municipal road, barangay road), for all roads between highway=motorway and highway=unclassified. So, a new classification system (based on the one used in roads in Canada, whose tagging guidelines are mostly divided by province) with a clear explanation of roads that can be tagged as such, will help.

• Motorway:
  • Expressways
• Trunk (backbone highway system):
  • Routes 1-11 (including those with sections passing ARMM, such as Route 1 and Route 75, but excluding bypassed sections of such routes in several cities and municipalities)
  • Route 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 (except portion in Dagupan bypassed by Route 241 and De Venecia Avenue Extension), 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 (Bacoor-Kawit section only), 64, 65 (except section in Carmona bypassed by Route 651), 66, 68, 69, 70 ,75, 76, 78, 79, 80, and 81
  • Secondary national roads (or segments of) constituting part of the Strong Republic National Highway routes, or those part of the provincial strategic highway systems.
• Primary (major highways outside the backbone system):
  • All primary and secondary national roads that are not part of the backbone network and the
  • Tertiary national roads that are major arteries (connects other municipality and complements the trunk highway network).
• Secondary (minor arterials that connects smaller localities with the highways)
  • Tertiary national roads, if it mostly used as a minor artery
  • Major provincial roads
  • All city/municipally-maintained arterial roads
• Tertiary (roads between the secondary and unclassified category, usually local collectors)
  • Major barangay roads
• Unclassified (other roads that are minor in importance, but are through routes)
  • All other through roads where "tertiary" will not fit.

(More details at Philippines/Mapping conventions/Roads)

I see this as a better classification for roads, given the route numbering system for national roads are now in effect (though signs are not yet placed at all roads), as this now gives what roads may get such classification, so, we can avoid inconsistent and inproportionate mapping of the road system, which is a common mapping problem in parts of the country. So, as part of this revised road classification, I have begun reclassifying of major roads with sub-national maintenace, starting in Batangas and La Union. Yet, the classification system does not give recommendations for through roads that are privately owned and maintained, so, please feel free to ask. -TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 01:20, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for opening this topic, @TagaSanPedroAko:. I am also working on a proposal to improve the road tagging consistency and improve harmonization with the DPWH road classification system.

Do you mind opening a Github ticket and continue the discussion at the OSMph PaperCutFix repo? Later, we'll document any agreed revisions or new conventions to adopt in the appropriate wiki page or entry. This is a draft of what I have in the discussion thread. Perhaps you can add Canadian highway conventions there? GOwin (talk) 02:30, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

I'll go when I have time, while I'm still expanding the Philippines road tagging page. And you may share ideas on that new page on what roads to be tagged, but, I'm already started with it, starting with expressway and major national roads (the trunk, or backbone highways).

Yes, I can add those for the Canadian roads, but it is already detailed. I am now in Alberta, so I'm working out also the roads there, but still continuing mapping the Philippines.-TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 02:37, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

It might make more sense to initiate the community discussions before documenting the road tagging page, unless that's a proposal you're offering to the community to consider. GOwin (talk) 02:49, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

@GOwin: I agree with the proposed system of...

• Motorway: expressway
• Trunk: primary national road
• Primary: secondary national road

...but, we may do a better system that also emphasizes importance/usage, because some primary national roads have not the usual importance of one (because they soon became urban arteries after being bypassed), and some secondary national roads are important than the others, especially in the densely populated provinces, where they are strategically important. Plus, tertiary national roads are a mix of many roads of different uses, usually those turned over from local governments or other national gov't agencies (or even expropriated from private owners), that can be troublesome to classify. So, we will classify the tertiary class national roads on a case-by-case basis, taking account the function, and proportion with the other classes in the road system.

For trunk, I am listing the exceptions on several routes, and also primary-class national roads that must be classified as trunk. I have the city/municipal arterials fall under secondary, and barangay roads that are collectors as tertiary, by default.

A consistent classification is good, but a better system must consider the general usage of the road, not just the general designation, and proportionality of each class must be also considered. As with the tertiary national roads, not all of them are important traffic routes (a lot of those may be local access, or even restricted access, like those in air bases, army camps, and naval bases). For barangay-maintained roads, we will consider most as tertiary, but we must also consider proportionality (we'll raise the most important ones to secondary, and downgrade others to unclassified where they are a through route, or residential, if it's primarily a local access to a residential area)

-TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 03:36, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Motorcycle taxis and Pedicabs

Hellow from Indonesia. We also have lots of motorcycle taxis ("ojek") and pedicabs ("becak") here and it would be great to decide on a better way to tag them. I asked on the Tagging list and this was also discussed at the Openstreetmap-carto Github, where many people thought that we shouldn't use amenity=taxi since a "taxi" is usually considered a 4-wheel car. That's true here too. What do you think about making new tags for motorcycle taxi stands and pedicab stands, for example amenity=motorcycle_taxi and amenity=pedicab? Or is there a better British English term that we can use (sorry, I'm American)? --Jeisenbe (talk) 14:14, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Covid-19 Military Checkpoints

We're four months into lockdown, and perhaps this is a bit late. I am thinking, if it is OK to add locations of Covid-19-specific military checkpoints?

I added a couple in Los Baños, Laguna with the tag military:covid19=checkpoint. I noticed that Covid-19-specific tags use :covid19 suffix. Chitetskoy (talk) 04:11, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

admin_level=12 for Puroks ?

I've always thought that, in our hierarchy of local places, puroks are never found in sitios. While working on OSMaPaaralan, I encountered school 109360, and according to the DepEd school database, their address is listed as "Purok Casunugan, Sitio San Ysiro" within Barangay San Jose of Antipolo City.

According to our current convention page, Purok and Sitio nodes are lumped together under admin_level=11, but in this case, and if used that way, this hierarchical order will be incorrect. I found several other puroks (Canumay, Libis) under sitio San Ysiro.

Perhaps it would be better to dis-aggregate a purok as admin_level=12 (place=* + designation=purok + admin_level=12), and keep admin_level=11 for sitios exclusively? Strictly speaking, these are not administrative entities, but purok and sitio leaders are usually designated by the barangay chairperson, so there's some sort of "administrative" relationship to these settlements.

I want to add here the same problem with Barangay as village or quarter. In Baguio there's Barangay Irisan, with for instance an area called San Carlos Heights, which includes then several Puroks each of them also have Subdivisions and Villages. So if we were to use already Quarter for Barangay - what's left then for San Carlos Heights? Which is so significant for Baguio that's it's the main road sign designation for the area, although officially not a administrative level. So I proposed on some other page (forgot actually where) that for cities with nested structures we follow the international conventions where Barangay becomes Suburb, San Carlos Heights then Quarter the purok adminstrative level 11 (or in this case 12 would be good as well) and then the villages and subdivisions neighborhoods.

Please feel free to put this comment, suggestion at a more appropriate place on the talk page as I understand this isn't specifically about the admin_level_ I just felt since we're already discussing the fact there's no unified system for the Philippines and an additional admin_level might be needed not just to cover Puroks we might also address the issue that not all Barangay always follow the same administrative or informal structure throughout the Philippines but might at single locations differ from what's "common"

I mean - there should be considerable thought about a general new classification to handle the "common" and the exceptions so it's clear for mappers what to do Hike&Map (talk) 01:14, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

level for arches

"Welcome arches or signs (often indicating "welcome", "good-bye", or "thank you" signs) are ways with the tags: man_made=gantry + level=1."

Shouldn't it be layer=1 instead of level=1? --Ivanbranco (talk) 15:05, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Good catch, Ivan! Thanks. Most likely an unintended typo. It's been fixed, but you could've fixed that too. --GOwin (talk) 03:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)